Archive for Language teaching and learning

It is not clear to me whether Chris Lonsdale, the managing shyster director at the language-teaching company Chris Lonsdale & Associates, is an out-and-out liar or merely has pork for brains and believes the nonsense he spouts. But what is clear to me is that not enough people are paying attention to the conjecture I mention in one section of this paper: that almost all strings of English words are ungrammatical.

When it comes to linguistics, convincing, worthwhile presentations (such as those by John McWhorter and Steven Pinker) are rare on TED; more typical are poorer ones (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here).

If that is true for TED, then I wouldn't expect better from TEDx. Indeed, the one TEDx program on linguistics that I have seen, which was published on November 20, 2013, has garnered a viral 5,859,273 views, and is still soaring, having received an additional two hundred thousand or so views since I saw it a couple of days ago — but it is a travesty of language pedagogy.

The second half of that post consisted of an account of a lecture that David Moser (of Beijing Capital Normal University and Academic Director of Chinese Studies at CET Beijing) had delivered a few days earlier (on 4/1/14) at Penn: "Is Character Writing Still a Basic Skill? The New Digital Chinese Tools and their Implications for Chinese Learning".

John McWhorter has an ambitious article in the Wall Street Journal for 1/2/15: "What the World Will Speak in 2115: A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent." The article covers a lot of ground and includes much daring prognostication along the way. I won't attempt to summarize everything in this rich essay, but — so far as Mandarin goes and so far as one is willing to make predictions about the future based on current circumstances, trends, and available data — I think that McWhorter is right on the mark.

When I began learning Mandarin nearly half a century ago, I knew exactly how I wanted to acquire proficiency in the language. Nobody had to tell me how to do this; I knew it instinctively. The main features of my desired regimen would be to:

1. pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year)

3. read massive amounts of texts in Romanization and, if possible later on (after about half a year when I had the basics of the language nailed down), in character texts that would be phonetically annotated

As a follow-up to my Language Log post on Li Yang's fēngkuáng liánxiǎng 疯狂联想 ("crazy association"), Chris Fraser sent me three images of an old Cantonese book that purports to teach English by means of what it calls "Táng zì zhù yīn" 唐字註音 ("phonetic annotation with Tang [i.e., Chinese] characters").

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg likes to say that cities are the new laboratories of democracy in the United States (sorry states!), particularly in an era of political paralysis in Washington. This was the premise behind the $9 million Mayor's Challenge launched last summer by Bloomberg Philanthropies, inviting any city with a population larger than 30,000 to submit a groundbreaking idea for funding. This morning, Bloomberg announced the five winners – including a $5 million grand prize to Providence, Rhode Island – for potentially replicable innovations "bubbling up" from cities in early childhood education, recycling, data analytics, civic entrepreneurship and resident wellbeing. […]

Grand Prize ($5 million): Providence, Rhode Island: Research suggests that in just the first few years of life, low-income children hear millions fewer words than their middle- and upper-income counterparts, impacting the development of their vocabularies and setting back their long-term prospects for academic and career success. This program aims to close that "word gap."

With no comment from me, I'll let Peter Lewis on "Our Mechanical Brain" tell you about how Rosetta Stone tried to create a festive advertisement for their language-learning software and managed to get a three-word sentence wrong in each of three different languages, and two out of the three wrong even on the second try. Read Peter's account here. And remember, when it's language, people never check. They never call a linguist. They just make stuff up.

Update: Rosetta Stone got in touch with Language Log and asked for space to respond. We're happy to provide that, of course. Here is what they said:

In a word, we’re ashamed. We tried to capture the spirit and meter of a popular Christmas tune and, regrettably, our enthusiasm for spreading marketing cheer outpaced our respect for linguistic accuracy. We green-lighted an ad before its time. The fact is, we have a stringent pedagogical approval process at Rosetta Stone, and we missed an important check-point here. There’s no excuse. The ads have been recalled. We assure you that from here on out, no one at Rosetta Stone–including marketing–will be taking shortcuts. We’re sure that this post will invite more thoughtful (even heated) criticism, and we hope you’ll understand if we don’t engage further in the dialogue for the moment—we have important work to do on the home-front. Thank you for keeping us in check and have a great holiday. (Hey, maybe we’ll try ‘Silent nuit, holy Nacht’….)